Hummingbird

Does a photograph have to be in focus to be good?

Cross Processed Flowers

Our First Flowers

Heather has planted some beautiful flowers in pots on and around our porch. Next year we will be ready to put in a garden, do some landscaping, and have even more flowers.

Butterflies, Left Out

Ok, so there were so many butterflies at the zoo I'm giving them their own post!

Love Child

Grateful Dad

I leaned over the colorful bucket and looked inside. The water was bright red. Then I looked at the gleaming white shirt, knotted all over with rubber bands.

"Zach, these shirts have to be perfect...are you sure you know how to do this?"

"Dad. I've been doing this for TWO YEARS. I Think I know what I'm doing by now."

(And he did, they came out great).

Tribblebytes Of Data

I have blogged before about my "out of control like jungle weeds" hard drive collection, which is perpetually bursting at the seams. My hard drives are like a herd of cattle out on a lush grassy plain, eating everything in site until they bust open messily and release copious amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Only in this case, it's not a smelly gas, it's my picture data.

So I have fought with different strategies to contain all of this precious data and keep it recently backed up (in the case of the pictures, two separate backups, one offsite in case of fire or art thieves). This has resulted in a wiry mess of different sized drives with colorful names. I just updated my list yesterday as we have a new computer coming soon and it will be filled with even more drives. I guess these drives are the modern equivalent of shoeboxes stuffed with photographs under the bed.

And I have a lot of shoeboxes:

Green Fairy 80GB MacBook Internal (User data, iPhoto database)
Orange Julius 200GB External (Lightroom catalog backups)
Blue Whale 300GB External (Music, Movies, Podcasts)
Black Hole 500GB External (Main photograph data)
White Dwarf 80GB Portable (Pictures from shoots - temp)
Purple Popsicle 1TB External (2x500GB concatenated set, Time Machine backups)
Aqua Wave 500GB External (Offsite pictures backup)
Red Dragon 500GB Mac Pro Internal (User data)
Grey Havens 2x160GB Mac Pro Internal striped RAID set (Photoshop scratch data)
Yellow Sun 1TB Mac Pro Internal (Future main photograph data)

I have some names saved up for future drives, but I'm open to suggestions.

So all this data uneasily co-exists on this haphazard flotilla of spinning platters. And despite the constant backups and built-in redundancies, I live in constant fear of that statistically inevitable day when the tribbles bust through the outer hull and data spills all over my desk.